Mario Sports Mix Gets 2011 Release Date

Nintendo has announced today that the highly anticipated Mario Sports Mix will be coming exclusively to the Wii on January 28th 2011 in Europe. Essentially, Mario Sports Mix is a collection of four high-energy arcade style sport games – Basketball, Volleyball, Hockey and Dodgeball – featuring famous Nintendo characters such as Mario, Peach, Yoshi, Wario, Daisy and Toad, as well as your personalised Miis.

In each game, you can use items that you find to scupper the opposition, such as banana skins to trip them up or green shells to fire at them and stun them. Each of the game’s characters will also have a unique special move, such as filling the opponent’s side with flowers for Daisy, or throwing a yellow “bomber shot” for Wario.

The game can be played either in single player mode or in up-to-four-player matches in every sport, where you’ll get to compete for three different cups – Mushroom, Flower and Star Cup. Play as your chosen Nintendo characters and pit your skills against your opposition of eight teams to become champion of each fast and furious sport, with extra stages and characters being launched on victory.

To ensure your experience will never be the same when replaying a tournament, an alternative path may appear where you’ll be faced with special challenges or a mini-game from the party mode to complete.

Four different mini-games can be played, each inspired by a different sport. In the Basketball mini-game, Feed Petey, you must grab low-hanging fruits and launch them into the mouth of Petey the piranha plant. In Smash Skate, you’ll have to push other players off a ledge using hockey sticks to perform charged shots, and in Bomb-omb Dodge you must dodge bombs that are shot by cannons at each corner of the Dodgeball court. Final mini-game, Harmony Hustle, sees different -coloured volleyballs thrown in line with the music onto the court, with it being your job to collect the one of your own colour and avoid lots of different traps and balls in order to win combo points.